Game round progress & stations

Suggestions
1

Currently the stations feel quite weak, especially near the end of a match where people have credits to spare and there are plenty of player controlled capital ships.

My suggestion would be to buff stations or some “Heavy” stations the following way:

*Shields or Shield bubble.

*Heavy weaponry that only targets ships the size of a destroyer or larger.

These buffs would be dependent on supplies brought in by the Haulers.
This will place more importance on taking out supply ships in order to break down some defenses of stations.

This will also bring more motivation for stealthier tactics with just smaller ships, fighter/bomber squads to take out defenses first instead of just bringing lots of cruisers/destroyers to overwhelm defenses.

I know Beam/laser weapons are not on the table for player controlled ships but how about an anti capital ship Beam weapon for Stations fueled by supplies from a ground Facility.

Not every stations would need these buffs, having just a few of these “Super” or “heavy” stations would be an great addition for the later game fase which currently feels to easy.

Sidenote:

By placing more importance on supplies for stations to keep their defenses up there might be more room for a future player controlled Hauler/supply ship/blockade runner class.

2 Likes
2

These are planned.

Agreed, those currently in place (floating weapon platforms around stations) are too weak.
As a side note, surface to orbit cannons are planed and already modeled on some bases.

Actually LASER point defenses are planned too, but not as heavy weaponry AFAIK. Slow moving beams are difficult to do because they are in fact streams of resource-intensive projectiles.

I think it would be interesting to have ammunition (both for structures and ships) be manufactured on the ground and brought in by haulers to stations, so defending/destroying haulers would be much more important. Maybe repair materials too. If ammo/repair shortage is too harsh, have some kind of debuff (slower repair/lower max HP, lower ammo capacity).

Haulers will probably stay restricted to AI according to the devs.

2 Likes
3

That idea floated a bit lately and I like it. If haulers keep doing the insane “warp right to the pad” thing it would also encourage players to pick them off mid flight or at the factory during a siege.

I myself want extreme long range beams, visible from many Mega Meters away. Even if it were ultra long spool up strategic anti base or NPC only base defence weapons.

Imagine the big canon on bases shoot at capital ships coming in … not caring that they are in warp, from hundreds of kilometres. It would add so much awe.
(Technically I think the beam effect could be scaled up the further away the viewer/player is to be visible from far away but still playable near it)

I strongly advise not adding more HP to bases. The time it takse to take down modules feels good. More and it will feel very grindy and boring in my opinion. Some stuff already takes a lot of time to destroy, like the reactor.

A multi stage process like described above could work and would be fun.
Small ships going in first, taking out small modules arround the istallations.
I feel like the installations are huge and beuatifull. They are nothing more then backdrops now and that is really sad.

Brute force capital fleet attack should still be possible. Be raised up much higher though as the stations can regen quite a bit of damage.

An alternative to shields could be repair. If the installation uses its resource pool to repair its modules, single ship forces will not be able to keep up and their attack will be futile.

I don’t think many additional resources should be added. Whatever the hauler carries is universal and it doesn’t really need to be further divided. Use it for recharching shield, defense ammo, ship spawns and repairs, whatever.
Players still can have cretits … if the installation is out of resources to give the player what he wants though … that’s it for instance.

One Idea. If a bubble shield generator is employed … it could be attacked by small ships … rather then falling instantly it could work like other shields in the game though, slowly getting patchy and allowing small ammounts of capitals through.
Passing trough it with capitals could syphon the capitals shields … adding them to the bubble shield. Thus, discentivising people to enter … they can, but they will have lost all their shields and may block off others who want to enter.

2 Likes
4

Yeah the ground facilitys are in a pretty good spot atm, I just think the space stations could use a major buff and to have the supply line and ground facilitys be an Achilles heel for the station.

Option A : attack a station head on, but better be sure to bring a good and balanced fleet with cruisers but also fighter/bomber squads for taking out capital ship defense weapons and shield modules of the space station.

Option B: take down supplies line to the station to weaken defenses by destroying ground faccility’s or intercepting haulers. So less forces are needed to take down the weakened station.

Shields for space station could also be tied to a ground generator. (like on the planet endor for the deathstar shield).

5

I agree stations feel a little weak. Spawn bays in particular might be a little too easy to take out. The bigger issue (as Hutch mentioned on stream today) is that the current winning strategy is just to take 3-5 ships and go wail on an undefended station.

One idea I had was to give the station weapons a major buff, but have them prefer to target AI ships, or give them a long delay to retarget a different ship after their target dies. The goal is to have those 3-5 ships face some risk if they come alone, but minimize the amount of “unfun” deaths players have to station defenses if you follow the AI mission coordinator.

The number one change I am really interested in is for stations to each have a unique name. The current battlescape is small enough that this shouldn’t be a problem, and it would cut down on so much confusion not to have to name both the moon / planet and station when calling out targets for attack and defense. I’m sure if you asked in Discord or a thread for cool, non-trademarked names you would get 50 in no time. Here’s some: Sagittate Station. Barglos factory. Grakate Station. Or do a fundraiser, and have people buy naming rights.

6

I think this was a Kickstarter reward on some of the higher tiers? But it hasn’t been implemented yet I don’t think.

Regardless, the names are clearly placeholders and will be made unique.

2 Likes
7

I love the idea of stations having powerful weapons that require resupply, but having them supplied by haulers would be too weak. Those are taken out too easily. I think there would need to be player controlled haulers for that to work.

Maybe a player picks up torpedoes in a hauler, delivers them, and then after delivering them that player gets to control the torpedo launcher on the station until the torpedoes they delivered are consumed?
It could be like a side mission to station defense.

1 Like